I Know a Karen or Two

I’ve known a few Karens, but I’m only going to mention two of them.

Karen. It’s a perfectly acceptable name that has been hijacked and uglified. It seems to me, it would have been better to call the entitled, tattling, trouble-making women “harpy”, or “hag”, or something a bit worse.

One acquaintance is pretty much emblematic of this recent name assignment. I’ve not seen her for a while, but when I knew her, she was bitter, cranky, demanding, unendingly fault-finding, trouble-making, entitled, and constantly seemed to be on the lookout for people who didn’t meet her standards. Then she’d gossip about them, whether she knew them or not. I did my best to keep my distance, but that wasn’t always possible. She made my life pretty miserable for a while.

On the other side of the Karen-coin is my neighbor, an older lady. She’s quiet, kind, and hard-working, and she is devoted to her family. She’s also been fighting stage-4 breast cancer for a while now. Her treatments often make her very ill. She’s lost a lot of her hair, most of her weight, and is a frail shadow of her former self. Yet she nursed her sick husband for years until he passed away. She helped take care of her son when he contracted COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic. She babysits her small grandchildren. Through all this, I’ve never heard one word of complaint from Neighbor Karen. Any time I ask her how she’s doing, she nods and says, “I’m pretty good! How are you?”

We all know it’s not the name that makes a difference. It’s the heart of the person and the love that they emit or squash.

I hope you know many of the second Karens and very few, if any, of the first group mentioned.